Rape Ruled Out in Case of 2 Indian Girls

NEW DELHI — When the bodies of two teenage cousins were found hanging from a mango tree in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh in May, the police initially said the girls had been abducted and raped, in what seemed like yet another grisly crime against women in India.

But the country’s top investigative agency announced this week that the girls, whose bodies were surrounded by a crush of TV reporters while they were still hanging from the tree, had killed themselves and that no rape or abduction was suspected.

“Our probe found that the two girls had committed suicide and weren’t murdered,” Ranjit Sinha, director of the Central Bureau of Investigation of India, told The Hindustan Times, referring to them as siblings. “The local police had erroneously conducted their probe along the lines that the sisters were killed.”

The findings put a strange coda on a case that became a symbol of what many claimed was the precarious safety of women in India. Along with the case of a medical student who was gang-raped and tortured on a New Delhi bus in December 2012, the grisly deaths of the Budaun girls, so called after the district where they lived, is seen as representing all that was wrong with India’s patriarchal culture. As recently as Tuesday, Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, cited the Budaun case at an event celebrating an international day to end violence against women.

As awareness of the case grew, the news media in this nation of 1.2 billion began reporting rapes almost daily, giving India an image of a place deeply antagonistic to women. Tourism suffered. Parliament passed a tough law to crack down on sexual violence.

But many sociologists here have questioned whether India was experiencing a true epidemic of rapes or if it was simply going through a media-created frenzy. Surveys around the world have shown that Indian women actually experience comparatively low levels of sexual violence.

The reasons are complex. For one, Indian women, particularly in the more conservative north of the country, are often severely restricted in their movements.

In a survey, most married women reported being unable to visit a nearby village or neighborhood unaccompanied.

The relatively low levels of sexual violence do not mean that India is an entirely safe place for women. Using techniques pioneered by Amartya Sen, a Nobel-winning economist, an American and Canadian research team estimated that there are tens of millions of “missing women,” as Mr. Sen called them, in developing countries. These are women who would be alive if they died at the same rates relative to men as women do in more developed countries. In a separate paper, the researchers concluded that in any given year, the number of missing women in India is more than two million.

Much of the reason is that families invest far more in caring for boys than they do for girls. Approximately two-thirds of infants in neonatal intensive care units, for instance, are boys. Tens of thousands of women are killed annually in disputes related to marriages and dowries, researchers estimate.

But overall, India has fairly low levels of violence, and that is true for women as well. Indian husbands beat their wives far less than men in many other developing countries, according to comparable surveys done in multiple countries. Domestic violence levels are far higher in Colombia, Egypt, Peru and Zambia than in India, the surveys found.

In the Budaun case, forensic reports confirmed that the girls had not been raped. And the police said that a key early witness in the case, Nazru, a man with one name who was distantly related to the girls, lied when he told the police that he had seen a suspect drag the two girls away. That suspect, along with four others arrested in the case, has since been released.

Still, the news media’s attention to the issue of rape has had salutary effects, Ravinder Kaur, a professor of sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, said on Thursday. The number of rapes reported to the police in recent years has surged, suggesting that increased attention to the crime may be encouraging more women to seek charges against their abusers rather than suffer in silence, she said.

“Whether there’s a real increase in rapes recently is impossible to tell at the moment,” Dr. Kaur said. “And the Budaun case should give us all pause. People made a lot of assumptions about those girls, and now we know almost every one of those assumptions were not true.”

Correction:

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misidentified the source of the reference to the two teenage cousins as sisters. It was Ranjit Sinha, director of the Central Bureau of Investigation, not The Hindustan Times.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Rape Ruled Out in Case of 2 Indian Girls. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe